Pope John XXIII

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Pope John XXIII, born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, left Venice for the conclave of 1958 carrying a return train ticket. He never used it. On the 28th of October 1958, at the age of 76, he was elected pope.

  The cardinals who chose him seemed to want a short reign. A man of his years, the thinking went, would keep the seat warm and change little. He proved that assumption wrong.

  How does a boy from a small Italian village come to lead the Catholic Church? Why did a supposed placeholder pick a name that popes had avoided for centuries? And what did he set in motion in the short time he had?

  4849817

• 2. Sharecropper's Son

  ›

  Sotto il Monte, a small village in the Bergamo province of Lombardy, is where Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born on the 25th of November 1881. He was the fourth of thirteen children and the eldest son of Giovanni Battista Roncalli and Marianna Giulia Mazzola. Most villagers worked as sharecroppers, and the Roncallis were no different. They tended a vineyard and cornfields and kept cattle. His predecessor Pius XII, born Eugenio Pacelli, came from a family long established in senior papal administration. The contrast could hardly have been sharper.

  Growing up in a family of thirteen came with loss. Maria Caterina, the eldest, died in 1883. A brother named Domenico Giuseppe lived for only the single year of 1888, and another brother, Luigi, died in 1898. The family was not without a past, however. Roncalli descended from a minor and impoverished branch of an Italian noble line. One account describes his forebears as worthy and respected people, traceable to the beginning of the fifteenth century.

  In 1889, at the age of 8, he received both his First Communion and his Confirmation. On the 1st of March 1896, Luigi Isacchi, the spiritual director of his seminary, enrolled him in the Secular Franciscan Order. Roncalli professed his vows in that order on the 23rd of May 1897.

  The 10th of August 1904 brought his ordination, in the Church of Santa Maria in Montesanto in Rome's Piazza del Popolo. He had just completed a doctorate in theology. Soon afterward he was taken to Saint Peter's Basilica to meet Pope Pius X. He then went home to celebrate Mass for the feast of the Assumption.

  In 1905 the new Bishop of Bergamo, Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi, made Roncalli his secretary. Roncalli also lectured at the diocesan seminary in Bergamo. The bishop died on the 22nd of August 1914, two days after Pius X. His last words to his secretary were "Angelo, pray for peace." The loss left a deep mark on the young priest.

  World War I pulled Roncalli into the Royal Italian Army as a sergeant. He served in the medical corps, working as a stretcher-bearer and as a chaplain. After an honorable discharge in early 1919, he became spiritual director of the seminary. On the 7th of May 1921 he was appointed a Domestic Prelate of His Holiness, which brought the title Monsignor.

  On the 6th of November 1921 Roncalli travelled to Rome and met Pope Benedict XV. The pope then named him Italian president of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. Roncalli later remembered Benedict XV as the most sympathetic of all the popes he had met. In February 1925, Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri summoned him to the Vatican with a decision from Pius XI.

  1416174220

• 3. Envoy in Wartime

  ›

  On the 25th of March 1925, in the church of San Carlo al Corso in Rome, Giovanni Tacci Porcelli consecrated Roncalli a bishop. Pius XI had named him titular archbishop of Areopolis and Apostolic Visitor to Bulgaria, a mission Roncalli first resisted and then accepted. His nomination was made official on the 19th of March. He remained in that role until 1935.

  On the 30th of November 1934 he was appointed Apostolic Delegate to Turkey and Greece. In Turkey's largely Muslim society he became known as "the Turcophile Pope." In October 1935 he led a group of Bulgarian pilgrims to Rome. On the 14th of that month he presented them to Pius XI.

  February 1939 brought news from his sisters that their mother was dying. Pius XI died on the 10th of that month, and the death of a pontiff meant Roncalli had to stay at his post until a successor was elected. His mother died on the 20th of February, during the nine days of mourning. A letter from Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli reached him in those weeks. Roncalli recalled it as probably the last Pacelli wrote before being elected Pius XII on the 2nd of March 1939. He listened to the new pope's coronation on the radio.

  In April 1939 Roncalli wrote in his journal, "I don't believe we will have a war." When war came, he happened to be in Rome, meeting Pius XII on the 5th of September 1939. In 1940 the Vatican asked him to give more of his time to Greece, and he visited in January and May of that year.

  His work as nuncio during the Holocaust is credited with saving refugees, most of them Jews. He is said to have sent immigration certificates for Palestine through the nunciature's diplomatic courier. He sent certificates of baptism to priests across Europe, as a way to rescue Jews. Children left Slovakia because of his interventions. Jews held at Jasenovac, near Stara Gradiška, were freed after he stepped in.

  Other episodes appear in the same record. Orphaned children from Transnistria sailed on a refugee ship from Constanța to Istanbul, and later reached Palestine. Prisoners at the Sereď camp were spared deportation to German death camps. Hungarian Jews saved themselves by conversion, using baptismal certificates he sent to the Hungarian nuncio, Monsignor Angelo Rota. He also persuaded King Boris III of Bulgaria to cancel deportations of Greek Jews during the Nazi occupation of Greece. Some people consider him a Righteous Gentile.

  On the 7th of September 2000, the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation launched a campaign to recognize these actions. The launch took place at the Vatican's mission to the United Nations, with Cardinal Angelo Sodano present. By then the foundation had published three reports of historical research. In 2011 it sent a massive file, the Roncalli Dossier, to Yad Vashem. The file urged that he be named Righteous among the Nations.

  After 1944 Roncalli also worked to win Catholic support for the founding of the State of Israel. He saw Jewish immigration to Palestine as a humanitarian matter rather than a question of biblical theology. That made him one of the Vatican's most sympathetic diplomats on the subject.

  On the 22nd of December 1944, Pius XII named him Apostolic Nuncio to newly liberated France. Part of the job was negotiating the retirement of bishops who had collaborated with the German occupiers. Roncalli met with Domenico Tardini before leaving, and Tardini seemed to disapprove of the choice. One curial prelate even called Roncalli an "old fogey" while speaking to a journalist.

  Roncalli left Ankara on the 27th of December 1944 and flew in short hops through Beirut, Cairo and Naples. He reached Rome on the 28th, met Tardini and his friend Giovanni Battista Montini, and left for France the next day. He would spend years in Paris. By the time he left, eight different men had served as French prime minister during his term.

  3036373231

• 4. Venice to the Vatican

  ›

  A message from Giovanni Battista Montini on the 14th of November 1952 asked whether Roncalli would accept the patriarchate of Venice, since Carlo Agostini was nearing death. On the 29th, a letter from Montini said Pius XII had decided to make him a cardinal. The appointment became official on the 12th of January 1953, when he was named Patriarch of Venice and Cardinal-Priest of Santa Prisca.

  Before leaving Paris, Roncalli invited all eight of those former prime ministers to dinner. He left France on the 23rd of February 1953 and took possession of his new diocese on the 15th of March. French President Vincent Auriol claimed an ancient privilege of French monarchs and presented him with the red biretta at the Élysée Palace. Three months later Auriol also made him a Commander of the Legion of Honour. Around then, with help from Monsignor Bruno Heim, Roncalli designed his coat of arms around the lion of Saint Mark on a white ground.

  In Venice he chose to live on the second floor of the patriarch's residence. He left alone the first-floor room once occupied by Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto, who later became Pius X. When Pius X was canonized on the 29th of May 1954, Roncalli had that room remodeled to look as it did in 1903, the year of Sarto's election as pope. He then celebrated Mass with the saint's few surviving relatives.

  His sister Ancilla was diagnosed with stomach cancer in the early 1950s. Roncalli's last letter to her, dated the 8th of November 1953, promised a visit within the week. She died on the 11th, while he was consecrating a new church in Venice. He attended her funeral in his hometown. Around this time his will stated a wish to be buried in the crypt of Saint Mark's Basilica, among some of his predecessors, rather than with his family.

  Pius XII died on the 9th of October 1958. On the 11th, his last full day in Venice, Roncalli watched the funeral broadcast. His journal dwelt on the abused state of the dead pontiff's body. The Vatican conclave then took eleven ballots.

  Montini, the Archbishop of Milan, had been widely considered a candidate. But he had not yet been made a cardinal, and the College of Cardinals usually chose from its own ranks. In those days, voting cardinals did not have to be under 80. Roncalli was summoned to the final ballot at 4:00 pm. At 4:30 pm he was elected with 38 votes.

  Cardinal Eugène Tisserant then asked the ritual questions of whether he accepted and what name he would take. "I will be called John," Roncalli answered. No pope had taken the name in over 500 years, since the Antipope John XXIII of the Western Schism. Roncalli explained to the cardinals that it was "a name sweet to me because it is the name of my father, dear to me because it is the name of the humble parish church where I received baptism." He added that he preferred to hide the smallness of his own name behind a magnificent succession of pontiffs.

  Some people then wondered whether he would be John XXIII or John XXIV. He settled it by declaring himself John XXIII, which affirmed that the earlier claimant had been an antipope. There had never been a Pope John XX at all. Medieval historians had misread the Liber Pontificalis as listing another John between John XIV and John XV. In private, he told Cardinal Maurice Feltin that he chose the name in memory of France and of John XXII, who had carried the papacy's history on in France.

  4849142017

• 5. Cassocks and Ceremony

  ›

  At 6:08 pm, an hour to the minute after the white smoke appeared, Cardinal Nicola Canali delivered the traditional Habemus Papam announcement. A short while later the new pope appeared on the balcony and gave his first Urbi et Orbi blessing to the crowd in Saint Peter's Square. That same night he named Domenico Tardini his Cardinal Secretary of State.

  Three cassocks had been prepared for whoever won. Even the largest did not fit his stout frame, so it was let out in places and held together with safety pins. Looking at himself in the mirror, he said, "This man will be a disaster on television!" He later described his first appearance before the world as like a "newborn babe in swaddling clothes."

  His coronation took place on the 4th of November 1958, the feast of Saint Charles Borromeo, in the central loggia of the Vatican. He wore the 1877 Palatine Tiara, and the ceremony lasted the traditional five hours. John XXIII was the last pope to use the full papal ceremony. Paul VI chose a shorter coronation, and later popes declined to be crowned at all.

  For other occasions he often wore the 1922 tiara of Pius XI, which became closely associated with him. The people of Bergamo gave him an expensive silver tiara. He asked that the jewels be cut by half and that the money go to the poor.

  Soon after his election, he told a story about a woman who cried out in a loud voice, "My God, he's so fat!" His reply was, "Madame, the holy conclave isn't exactly a beauty contest!"

  On Christmas Day 1958, he became the first pope since 1870 to make pastoral visits within his Diocese of Rome. He saw children with polio at the Bambino Gesù Hospital, then went to Santo Spirito Hospital. The next day he visited Rome's Regina Coeli prison, telling the inmates, "You could not come to me, so I came to you." In his diary he recorded "great astonishment in the Roman, Italian and international press."

  On these visits he set aside the formal papal "we." At a reformatory school for juvenile delinquents in Rome, he said, "I have wanted to come here for some time." The media noticed that he talked to the young people in their own language.

  His first consistory, on the 15th of December 1958, made Montini a cardinal. Montini would become his successor as Paul VI. That consistory broke the limit of seventy cardinals set by Sixtus V in 1586, and the college later grew to 85. Over five consistories John XXIII created 52 cardinals. They included the first ever from Japan, Peter Doi, and from Tanzania, Laurean Rugambwa.

  In 1960 he also named three cardinals in pectore, keeping their identities secret. He died before revealing them, so those appointments never took effect. According to Loris Francesco Capovilla, one of them was Francesco Lardone, who thought he could help bishops behind the Iron Curtain better from his post in Turkey. In November 1960 Diego Venini turned down an offer of the cardinalate. In April 1962 John XXIII personally ordained as bishops the twelve cardinals who were not yet bishops, following a new rule that all cardinals must be bishops.

  4950527475

• 6. Reaching Across Divides

  ›

  On the 17th of October 1960, John XXIII met 130 American Jews connected with the United Jewish Appeal. He greeted them with a line from Genesis, "I am Joseph your brother." Joseph's reconciliation with his brothers set the tone for what he hoped would be a new relationship. He had also sent a message to the Chief Rabbi of Israel announcing his election, though the Holy See did not then recognize the State of Israel.

  On the 17th of March 1962, he saw people leaving the synagogue in Rome and had his car stopped to bless them. A rabbi described what followed. The Jews surrounded him and applauded, after a moment of bewilderment. The rabbi called it the first time a pope had blessed Jews and perhaps the first real gesture of reconciliation.

  In 1960 he removed the word perfidius, Latin for "faithless," from the Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews. He interrupted his first Good Friday liturgy as pope when he heard a celebrant use it. That year he also changed the rite for baptizing adults. The old text for a Jewish convert had told the convert to "abhor Hebrew perfidy and reject Hebrew superstition." John wanted "to emphasize everything that unites and to remove anything that unduly divides believers in God."

  During the Second Vatican Council he asked Cardinal Augustin Bea to prepare documents on reconciliation with the Jewish people. The declaration Nostra aetate is generally thought to reflect his teachings. In 1965 the Catholic Herald quoted a prayer attributed to him that asked, "Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews." When he died, Israel's Chief Rabbi, Yitzhak Nissim, mourned a loss that saddened everyone seeking peace and human love.

  His outreach reached other churches too. He especially sought out the Eastern Orthodox churches and worked to ease tensions between the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church. His policy of Ostpolitik, meaning "Eastern policy," opened dialogue with the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. He sought conditions in which Eastern Catholics might find relief from persecution. The Second Vatican Council did not condemn Communism and never mentioned it, which some have called evidence of a secret agreement between the Holy See and the Soviet Union.

  In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, John XXIII offered to mediate between President John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. Both men applauded his commitment to peace. Khrushchev later sent good wishes for the pope's failing health through Norman Cousins. John typed a reply thanking him himself. Cousins went to New York, and John became the first pope named Time magazine's Man of the Year. John Paul II followed in 1994 and Francis in 2013.

  At home in Italy he forbade bishops from interfering in local elections. He also helped the Christian Democracy party cooperate with the Italian Socialist Party. His view of equality was summed up in his words, "We were all made in God's image, and thus, we are all Godly alike."

  2935555363

• 7. Council and Doctrine

  ›

  The Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls was where, on the 25th of January 1959, John XXIII announced an ecumenical council. It came fewer than 90 years after the First Vatican Council. Before that, the Council of Trent had met in the sixteenth century. Montini told Giulio Bevilacqua that "this holy old boy doesn't realize what a hornet's nest he's stirring up." The council would bring a comprehensively revised liturgy, a stronger emphasis on ecumenism and a new approach to the world.

  On the 4th of October 1962, the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi, he visited Assisi and Loreto to pray for the council. He was the first pope to travel outside Rome since Pius IX. Crowds greeted him at stops in Orte, Narni, Terni, Spoleto, Foligno, Fabriano, Iesi, Falconara Marittima and Ancona.

  The first session opened on the 11th of October 1962, the date that is now his feast. He gave the opening address, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia. That night, crowds in Saint Peter's Square chanted for him to appear at his window. He did, and he told them to go home and hug their children, saying the hug came from the pope. The talk became known as the Speech of the Moon, because he pointed to the moon looking down on the gathering.

  The first session closed in a solemn ceremony on the 8th of December 1962. On the 12th of November he had announced that the next session would run from the 12th of May to the 29th of June 1963. His closing remarks made subtle references to Pius IX, whom he hoped to see beatified and canonized. In a 1959 retreat journal he had written of imitating Pius IX in his sacrifices.

  On doctrine, John XXIII has been considered a traditionalist. The writer Stravinskas notes his determination to keep faith with past teaching while giving it a contemporary tone. He did stop the automatic practice of building social and political policy on old theological propositions. In 1962 he published changes that produced the 1962 Roman Missal, the last edition of the Tridentine Mass codified in 1570 by Pius V. It added the name of Saint Joseph to the canon of the Mass, the first change to the canon in centuries. Many traditionalist Catholics still use it.

  In 1963 he set up a commission of six non-theologians to look into questions of birth control. In his encyclical Pacem in terris he wrote of human rights, saying "Man has the right to live. He has the right to bodily integrity and to the means necessary for the proper development of life." On marriage, he held that divorce goes against Church teaching, because the family rests on a sacrament that is one and indissoluble.

  He proclaimed Saint Lawrence of Brindisi a Doctor of the Church on the 19th of March 1959, with the title "Doctor apostolicus." Among those he canonized were Martin de Porres on the 6th of May 1962 and Vincent Pallotti on the 20th of January 1963.

  Two episodes remain contested. The historian Sérgio Luzzatto describes a controversial relationship with Padre Pio, marked by John's skepticism and criticism. Another source says John's attitude was generally positive, but that bad information made him doubtful. It adds that shortly before his death he admitted he had been misinformed and asked Padre Pio to pray for him.

  On the 17th of August 2003, The Guardian published a confidential Church document dated the 16th of March 1962 and bearing his seal. Titled Crimen sollicitationis, it ran to 69 pages. It told bishops to handle cases of clerical sexual abuse in strict secrecy, under penalty of excommunication, and asked victims to take an oath of secrecy. The Vatican replaced its procedures in 2001.

  6063646168

• 8. Final Months and Afterlife

  ›

  A diagnosis of stomach cancer came on the 23rd of September 1962 and was kept from the public. It followed nearly eight months of occasional hemorrhages that had cut back his appearances. In April 1963 he told visitors, "That which happens to all men perhaps will happen soon to the Pope who speaks to you today."

  On the 7th of March 1963, the feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas, he raised the Angelicum to the rank of Pontifical University with the motu proprio Dominicanus Ordo. On the 10th of May he received the Balzan Prize in private at the Vatican. He deflected the praise toward the five popes of his lifetime, from Leo XIII to Pius XII.

  The next day, Italian President Antonio Segni formally presented the prize at the Quirinal Palace. John suffered severe stomach pain in the car on the way. He insisted on going anyway, refusing to accept the honor inside the Vatican. He said it would insult the crucified Saint Peter to honor a pontiff on his remains. It was his last public appearance.

  On the 25th of May 1963 another hemorrhage required several blood transfusions. The cancer had perforated the stomach wall, and peritonitis set in. His aide, Loris F. Capovilla, told him nothing more could be done. His remaining siblings came to be with him, and by the 31st he was confined to bed.

  At 11 am, Cardinal Petrus Canisius van Lierde came to anoint him. The pope spoke for the last time: "I had the great grace to be born into a Christian family, modest and poor, but with the fear of the Lord. My time on Earth is drawing to a close. But Christ lives on and continues his work in the Church. Souls, souls, ut omnes unum sint." Van Lierde anointed his eyes, ears, mouth, hands and feet. Overcome by emotion, he forgot the proper order, and John gently helped him.

  John XXIII died of peritonitis at 19:49 on the 3rd of June 1963, aged 81, after four years and seven months as pope. A Mass for him, celebrated by Luigi Traglia, had just ended in Saint Peter's Square below. Then the room was lit, telling the crowd what had happened. Italy declared three days of mourning, Spain ten, the Philippines nine and Brazil five. He was buried on the 6th of June in the Vatican Grottoes. Prisoners of Regina Coeli and of the Mantova jail donated the two wreaths at his tomb. On the 22nd of June, a day after being elected, Paul VI prayed there.

  Paul VI opened his cause for canonization on the 18th of November 1965. On the 3rd of September 2000, John Paul II declared him Blessed alongside Pius IX, after a miracle involving the cure of an ill woman. His body was then moved to the altar of Saint Jerome. It was found extremely well preserved, which the Church attributes to embalming and the lack of airflow in his sealed triple coffin. When it was moved in 2001, it was treated again. John Paul II lay in the original vault from the 9th of April 2005 until April 2011, and Benedict XVI after his death in 2022.

  On the 3rd of June 2013, Pope Francis visited the tomb to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. A month later, on the 5th of July 2013, Francis approved John XXIII for canonization without the usual second miracle, citing his service to the Second Vatican Council. On Divine Mercy Sunday, the 27th of April 2014, he and John Paul II were declared saints. His feast day is the 11th of October, not the 3rd of June, because that date already belongs to Charles Lwanga and companions. Admirers call him "the Good Pope," il papa buono.

  On the 3rd of December 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Paul VI wrote in his first encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam, that John had labored to bring divine truths within reach of modern man. In 1965 Harry Saltzman produced a biography film, A Man Named John, with Rod Steiger in the title role. It draws on the diary he kept from age 14 to 18.

  His spiritual diary, published as Journal of a Soul, remains widely read. Pier Paolo Pasolini dedicated his 1964 film The Gospel According to St. Matthew to his memory. Schools bear his name from Perth in Western Australia to Timaru in New Zealand, and from Koforidua in Ghana to Omaha, Nebraska. A statue of him stands in Istanbul. On the 6th of May 2019, in Sofia, Pope Francis held up his encyclical Pacem in terris as a "code of conduct" for peace between Catholics and other religions.

  8197939589